Earth & Sky

The following individual was interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

Dr. Gretchen Daily
Stanford University
Department of Biological Sciences

Supplemetal web sites:

Stanford Online Report – What price paradise? Making conservation profitable

From the United Nations web site – New York City watershed whole farm programme

EPA Office of Water – WATERSHED PROGRESS: New York City Watershed Agreement

Interview with Dr. Gretchen Daily:

ES: Please tell me something about yourself, your name, title and institution.

GD: My name is Gretchen Daily. My title is Bing Interdisciplinary Research Scientist, and I’m here at Stanford University.

ES:

GD: As a scientist, I work on trying to understand how Earth’s life support systems operate and the benefits that we get from the planet’s ecosystems that are delivered to society. So my main interest is looking at ecosystems as a type of capital, as a kind of capital asset that supply us with a stream of benefits over time. And those benefits are things like purification of our water by forest ecosystems, control of flooding by wetland ecosystems, provision of pharmaceutical products by many tropical forest ecosystems, many other kinds of services like that, that we get from nature. We basically get it for free. And what I’m working on now is trying to figure out, “what’s the minimum that we need to protect in some way, to keep our economy going and to keep human society in good shape. Because as the size and the aspirations of the human population grow ? and they’re growing at an incredible rate right now ? we’re liquidating our ecosystem capital. We’re not investing in it like we do in other kinds of capital ? our homes, our offices, our financial capital. We keep really good track of our human capital that’s critical to our economic well-being, but we haven’t paid attention to our natural capital, our ecosystem capital. And as we liquidate it, we really put human societies at risk. So I’m trying to find out what kind of balance might be struck between conservation and maintaining our economic well-being. And I’m working with a lot of other scientists, and also people in the private sector in economics and law, to find out how to reward people for maintaining critical aspects of our life-support system. So, for instance, people who manage forests don’t get rewarded, typically, for the water purification services those forest supply or for their carbon sequestration or climate control services that the forests supply. If we expect to keep getting these services from people who own and manage such ecosystems, we really ought to compensate and reward people for providing them. So what I’ve been looking into, and what the book is about, is how to align financial incentives, economic incentives, with conservation of these critical ecosystems that supply us with our life support services.

ES: What are some examples of this?

GD: It’s one thing to say in theory that,” ecosystems are really valuable to people, that we couldn’t live without them, and that we need to protect them to keep our economy going and our well-being up.” But how do you actually put theory into practice? That’s the really difficult question. What the book is about – the book that I just co-authored with Kathy Ellerson, a journalist, which is called The New Economy of Nature, the Quest to make Conservation Profitable – the whole theme of the book is on how remarkable individuals and governments, other kinds of organizations have managed to put theory into practice, and find ways of actually aligning economic incentives with conservation. One good example, of many, is the case of New York City, which for years and years has had really pure drinking water, better drinking water than most cities anywhere in the world. They’ve been famous for that until the late 1980s when a lot of development up in the watershed, where the water comes from, about a hundred miles north of the city, an area called the Catskills. The watershed started being heavily affected by a lot of development of second homes ? there’s a lot of agriculture up there and so on. So the city was faced with a choice of how it had to clean up and maintain its pure drinking water. And the most obvious option was to invest in physical capital and build a filtration plant. The other option that people considered was pretty novel, and that was to invest in watershed protection and go into this area – again 100 miles away from the city – and pay farmers, and local towns and land owners of all sorts to manage their land in a way that was compatible with storing these water purification services. And that’s what they opted to do on economic grounds. So it turns out it’s a lot cheaper, it’s costing about two billion dollars, maybe in perpetuity to restore the water purification services in this lovely forested region. Whereas it would have cost six to eight billion dollars in just over ten years to build and operate a physical filtration plant. So that’s one example where it turns out that investing in ecosystem capital could provide society with these critical services is actually a lot cheaper than investing in a technological alternative. Another example comes from the well known “wine country” in California. Napa Valley is famous for having swanky bed and breakfasts, mud baths, and that sort of thing, as well as a lot of wine tasting. There’s actually this town called Napa where none of the tourists bother to visit, and that’s partly because its been under water during many winters and has suffered about half a billion dollars worth of damage caused by flooding over the past few decades. And what Napa residents decided to do to deal with flooding – again which is sort of similar to the New York case ? they had one option which was more in the way of building dikes and levies and other U.S. Army Core of Engineers structures to try and hem in the energy of the river when it was flowing really high during storms. The other option was to instead invest in natural capital and restore the flood plain that once existed near the city, and allow that, like a big sponge, to soak up the excess floodwaters during stormy periods. And they too opted for that latter approach, going for natural capital on an economic basis. And so far it’s working really well. They’ve actually moved, or removed entirely, none different rivers and over 100 different buildings ? you know, buying up properties at market rates ? and converted the area occupied by those structures into a beautiful scenic river area with bicycle paths and sport fishing, bird watching, and that kind of thing. This has just proven to be a huge draw. Not only is there the security form flooding, but there’s beautiful views, property values have shot up right along the river, and the town has really become revitalized. And again, it proved economically beneficial to invest in ecosystem capital rather than physical capital. So those are two examples. Managing drinking water quality and trying to manage floods. Two of the biggest issues anywhere in North America where taking an ecosystem approach can really pay off. So, anyway, the book covers a whole bunch of other examples where people have found really innovative ways of pairing local residents or land managers to do what they’re doing a little bit differently to maintain the stream of benefits that we get from ecosystems. The best hope we have so far in trying to manage our environmental ecosystem, we’re just not succeeding on a charitable basis. We’re never going to manage to save enough, I don’t think, of Earth’s critical life support services around the planet to maintain human well being unless we reward people for doing so in the short term, in economic terms.

ES:

GD: First let me get into, “what is natural capital, ecosystem capital?” Any ecosystem is simply, the organisms you find living in an area, the plants, animal, the little microbes that we can’t see, interacting with the physical environment. So, looking out our windows ? unless you’re in the middle of a big city ? you’re probably looking out on some sort of ecosystem, your lawn, a garden, your house, maybe a more scenic park, all of those are ecosystems. Agricultural land, those are ecosystems. And we now, around the planet, humanity controls what’s going on in most ecosystems. Even in areas that look like vast expanses of wilderness, they’re affected by human activities in a huge way. For instance, it seems likely that human activities are changing the planet, that we’ve already started changing the climate, and that certainly affects even the most remote ecosystems. But then, those right around their homes, and those on agricultural land, obviously are controlled by people, and we’re determining what kinds of services we get from those ecosystems. So, on agricultural land we’re trying to get food, obviously, but we don’t tend to think very creatively about what we get from other types of land. We obviously get aesthetic benefits ? a lot of people are really into gardening, and that sort of thing ? but there are all kinds of other benefits that are equally important, actually vital to human well being, like managing water quality. Ecosystems like forests, by soaking up water as it falls from the sky in the form of rain or snow, and then letting it percolate very slowly through the soil where all kinds of microorganisms tackle any toxins and help break them down and help kill off any pathogens that might affect human beings. Those forested ecosystems do a lot of work for society to purify our water. They also, by soaking up water like a sponge, help mete it out gradually. Rather than what you have on the moon, with out forest ecosystems, you’d have periods of flash flooding followed by drought. So I think one of the best ways to think about natural capital and what it is to imagine trying to set up a happy, day-to-day life on the moon. What would you bring with you to make living up there possible? What kinds of species [would you bring?] obviously you’d want to ate for breakfast and dinner, and all the species that contributed to the various pharmaceutical products we use, aspirin and many other very commonly used pharmaceuticals owe their origin to natural products. In fact the vast majority of our pharmaceuticals do. And then you might think about, we what are you going to build your house out of? Do you want to have wood up there for the purposes of construction and furniture making and maybe having a nice fire and heating your home and all that sort of thing. But just listing those species that we use directly would get you almost nowhere in trying to figure out how to live happily up on the moon. And that’s because, most species and the ecosystems that they live provide us with all kinds of indirect services that we tend not to think about. An example is purification of out water, control of floods by wet lands, purification of water by forests and other ecosystems, and then a lot of things like pollination of crops. It turns out that 2/3 of our agricultural crops rely on little bees and other insects to go buzzing around transferring pollen from one plant to the next. And without the activity of all those little insects, we wouldn’t have any of those crops. A lot of our fruits, vegetables, and nuts, coffee, depend on animal pollination for good yield. Pest control is another huge one. The vast majority of potential agricultural pests are controlled naturally by pest enemies. Things like little spiders and wasps, beetles, all kinds of other insects control most of things that would otherwise munch our crops. So by thinking about going to the moon you can imagine, a little bit, what kinds of ecosystems you’d want to set up there. And rather than listing species directly, because we have no idea how many or which combination of species are required to support human life. You’d have to list the services that we get from ecosystems. And there you’d be listing things like pollination, pest control, and erosion control, flood control, purification of water, stuff like that. Then you’re trying to figure out,” well, which sorts of ecosystems might supply those services. And it’s the same thing now. And you might think that this moon analogy is kind of far-fetched. But actually, her on Earth, human activities are wiping out most natural ecosystems. And we’re really controlling the future of life on the planet, and possibly in the whole universe, basically until the next asteroid hits humanity, much more than any other force will dictate what kind of life we’ll have here on Earth. That’s why it’s critical, not only from an ethical point of view, but just from a practical point of view, and an economic point of view to start asking,” well, what is the value to human society, and how do we incorporate that value into policy, into our decision making. And often it’s silly to try and reduce the value into a particular dollar and cent figure. Obviously there are many deep philosophical and spiritual aspects to valuing nature that we’ll never capture in strict economic terms. But the nice thing about taking an economic or business approach to the environment is that often, just the very narrowly defined value of say, water purification, is so high that it makes perfect sense to protect an ecosystem for its water purification services. So in the case of New York, for instance, those Catskills mountains have many different kinds of value ? cultural and historical value, spiritual value, a lot of aesthetic value, all those other values are really difficult to capture in standard decision making and economic terms. But the water purification value is so high, that people opted to invest in restoration and protection of the Catskills just for that. And they’re thereby protecting all these other values that are much more difficult to handle in the crazy world of making public policy today. So the beauty of taking this ecosystem services approach is that often one major service water purification or flood control is enough and it can serve as an umbrella under which we can protect a lot of other services that are either not as well known, or much harder to capture in economic and business policy making terms.

ES: What reaction do you get to this ecosystem capital approach to conservation from the scientific community?

GD: In the scientific community there’s a huge amount of interest developing now around characterizing our ecosystem’s assets better. So more and more ecologists and natural scientists are being asked by political leaders and business leaders to tell them,” well, how valuable is this piece of land in supplying, say water purification services.” And ecologists are realizing that we really just at the beginning of starting to understand the value of ecosystems in supporting human well being. So there’s a huge effort in the ecological community now and a very broad international effort to try and supply useful information for decision makers about, for instance, how much land would you want to set aside and manage quite carefully for water purification for a given city? How much do you need? What are the tradeoffs? Because we’re not talking about protecting everything. We’re talking about deciding these tradeoffs we face all around us. You know, human populations grow, and as development proceeds, we need to figure out where to strike that balance. And the scientific community is really gearing up now to try and provide that information and say,” OK, if you protect this much, you’ll get most of the water purification services that you’ll need. And then maybe it makes sense to develop these other areas for other purposes. So the effort that scientists are engaging in now is called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. And it’s a broad, United Nations, international effort, like that of the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which has really organized the climate community around addressing scientific issues of great concern to society, like “ well how much warmer will the planet become, and how will weather patterns change at a regional level as we continue to inject greenhouse gasses into the air?” The idea of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is similar, that we’ll stimulate a lot of research within the scientific community into the more precise values of different kinds of ecosystems to society. And that we’ll deliver this information in a useful way to policy makers. So the kinds of questions that ecologists and other natural scientists are addressing are the following:
How much land do you need to protect or set aside in a certain way to provide a given amount of service? In a farming landscape, for instance, If you’re growing a lot of fruits and vegetables and nut crops and other things that rely on insect pollinators, how much land should farmers set aside to ensure that the pollinators themselves ? the little bees and things ? have nesting sights, and have year-round food in the form of nectar, pollen, and are otherwise happy and safe from pesticides and that sort of thing in order to keep pollination services and yield and profit to farmers up. So that’s the really key question. Very little is know. We know we’re losing pollinators, at a really dramatic rate, because those odd little corners of agricultural land are often converted to more agricultural land, rather than just leaving them there as semi-natural habitat that might support pollinators. And we’re also using more and more pesticides, and that contributes to wiping out pollinator populations. But we don’t really know what the optimal amount or distribution of land between cropland and little strips of semi-natural habitat to keep pollination up. Another kind of question is: how sensitive are ecosystem services to human disruption, and how amenable are they to repair? What we’re finding out now, in the Napa case and in the New York case, where they’ve gone in and really tried to restore these ecosystem services that have been bad impaired, and a big open question is: how long will it take to really ensure the drinking water quality of New York? Just going in really quickly and helping to protect the most vulnerable areas of land from development, will that secure New York’s water supply? Or are the pathogens like giardia and cryptosporidium, and other dangers like the excess nutrients that come from farmland, from our lawns and things like that, are those still going to leach into the water supply system even after the critical land has been protected from development? So those are some of the questions that people are asking. How can we optimize our investments in ecosystem capital?

ES: In the process of doing your research, what’s something that really surprised you?

GD: Well, I guess I’ve come up against two really big surprises. One of them is just how profound human impacts are around the planet. You sort of read about this in the newspapers, and it all seems pretty abstract, but humanity really does control the planet and there isn’t much in the way of wilderness left. But I thought you could still get away and with some work and some difficult travel, still get into the heart of the Amazon and really feel like you were in a system that hasn’t been very affected by people. But I just haven’t found that true. I’ve done quite a bit of traveling around the world and was recently in the Amazon just couldn’t believe it. Just a relative handful of people living in this remote area I was visiting had completely wiped out most of the larger mammals. They’d fished out bigger and edible fish in the rivers, and cut down and helicoptered out or shipped by river all the big and highly valuable trees. So it’s incredible to see how even in a remote place like that how affected everything is by human activities even if there are just a few people there. That’s driven home to me the fact that even though we live on this big, huge blue sphere, as it looks from outer space, there’s so many people and we’re driving for a good life and stuff, there’s just nothing really that remains natural and wild anymore. So that’s on the one side, and that’s kind of bad as an ecologist to realize that the era of wilderness is really over. We’re in a new era here. People, we’ve subdued and conquered the Earth some time ago, and we really have to face up to the responsibility we have now in deciding what to do. Instead, we tend to control the planet by default, you know, without thinking about it. It would really pay off to think a little more carefully and systematically about what we’re doing. And then on the bright side, the thing that I’ve found is to protect ecosystems, it’s not always just a huge conflict with our economic well-being. It’s always presented as, if you’re going to protect ecosystems, that means somehow hurting people economically. In fact, there is a very clear way to harmonize a lot of our economic activities with environmental protection. And that’s the main message in the book. There’s a lot of reason for hope. Even though we’re a numerous species, and we have really huge aspirations to consume and impact the planet